ExcursionsA village in Sierra Leone. A refugee trail over the Pyrenees in French Catalonia. A historic copper mine in Sweden. The Shuf mountains in Lebanon. The Swiss Alps. The heart of the West African diaspora in southeast London. The anthropologist Michael Jackson makes his sojourns to each of these far-flung locations, and to his native New Zealand, occasions for exploring the contradictions and predicaments of social existence. He calls his explorations “excursions” not only because each involved breaking with settled routines and certainties, but because the image of an excursion suggests that thought is always on the way, the thinker a journeyman whose views are perpetually tested by encounters with others. Throughout Excursions, Jackson emphasizes the need for preconceptions and conventional mindsets to be replaced by the kind of open-minded critical engagement with the world that is the hallmark of cultural anthropology. Focusing on the struggles and quandaries of everyday life, Jackson touches on matters at the core of anthropology—the state, violence, exile and belonging, labor, indigenous rights, narrative, power, home, and history. He is particularly interested in the gaps that characterize human existence, such as those between insularity and openness, between the things over which we have some control and the things over which we have none, and between ourselves and others as we talk past each other, missing each others’ meanings. Urging a recognition of the limits to which human existence can be explained in terms of cause and effect, he suggests that knowing why things happen may ultimately be less important than trying to understand how people endure in the face of hardship. |
From inside the book
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... Death , and Rebirth 192 11 Quandaries of Belonging home thoughts from abroad 216 12 A Critique of Colonial Reason 233 notes 257 references 271 index 289 Acknowledgments For generous support during my fieldwork or critical feedback Contents.
... thought , and the kind of action that does greatest justice to life as it is lived . In the Bhagavad Gita , Arjuna finds himself between two armies , each of which includes kinsmen , teachers , companions , and friends , and he despairs ...
... thought in the academy ? Of Walter Benjamin , Hannah Arendt wrote that " he thought poetically , but he was neither a poet nor a philoso- pher ” ( 1973 : 154 ) . Taking Benjamin's work as a point of departure , let me outline the place ...
... thought to be " talk from the dead , " and the sonic patternings of sadness and weeping among the bereaved are echoed in the calls of different species of birds . As Steven Feld notes , " poetic language is bird language " ( 1982 : 34 ) ...
... thought—beautiful perhaps; mistaken certainly. But if we consider the effects of this conceit in Bosavi life— the way this equation enables people to live with loss, to express their grief, to connect meaningfully and intimately with ...
Contents
1 | |
2 Of Time and the River the interface of historyand human lives | 22 |
3 Imagining the Powers That Be society versusthe state | 40 |
4 On the Work of Human Hands | 61 |
5 Storytelling Events Violence and the Appearance of the Past | 80 |
6 Migrant Imaginaries with Sewa Koroma in southeast London | 102 |
7 A Walk on the Wild Side the idea of human nature revisited | 135 |
8 From Anxiety to Method a reappraisal | 154 |
9 Despite Babel an essay on human misunderstanding | 174 |
10 On Birth Death and Rebirth | 192 |
11 Quandaries of Belonging home thoughts from abroad | 216 |
12 A Critique of Colonial Reason | 233 |
Notes | 257 |
References | 271 |
Index | 289 |